Research

With Facebook about to pass the 1 billion user mark, YouTube taking the #2 rank as a global search engine, Zynga having gone IPO and Twitter on the way, the total of mobile phone devices having blown past the number of wired ones, three things have become apparent:

With progress toward a world that is always on and all ways connected (think of this as ubiquitous and continuous communications meets pervasive computing) a look back at just the past five years by anyone demonstrates how much ICT has already transformed the ways we work and live.

To use a common phrase, “we ain’t seen nothing yet.” The pace of change is accelerating.

In the process the nature of who we are and how we interact with the world, especially our virtual personae will have profound implications.

All of this and more is captured in a fascinating new book, Identity Shift: Where Identity Meets Technology in the Networked-Community Age, written by leading market research experts, Allison Cerra and Christina James, from Alcatel-Lucent. The second in “The Shift” series of Web 2.0 analyses, this latest edition looks at consumer behavior across all the key stages of life and how they are influenced by communications technologies.

As Alcatel-Lucent Market and Consumer Insight groups, along with a team from IMRB International, wind down their neo-urbanization research in India, this week we learn that the group landed in an area that is finding prosperity, representative of a larger trend in the country.

The final leg of Alcatel-Lucent’s three-week journey took them from Bhiwadi to Coimbatore, a “town” of 1.25 million people located at the base of the Western Ghats foothills in the Tamil Nadu region of South India.

In a quest to better understand the impacts of a phenomenon known as “neo-urbanization,” Alcatel-Lucent Market and Consumer Insight groups have teamed up with IMRB International to piece together this growth puzzle by traveling to specific territories of India. The ultimate goal is to predict how this rapid progression will unfold in the next five to 10 years. Urbanization is modernizing many areas of the world that were previously without access to healthcare, education, employment – and technology.

As highlighted in the first of this continuing series on the group’s fact-finding tour, the team has been filing almost daily blogs on their experiences and the reports on the second leg are fascinating.

Urbanization is modernizing many areas of the world that were previously without access to healthcare, education, employment – and technology.

According to Alcatel-Lucent, 60 percent of the world’s population expected to live in cities by 2025, which means that “neo-urbanization” — the transformation of historically rural and typically impoverished areas into cities — will have far-reaching implications and impact, including improved quality of life for countries with exploding populations.

In literally a quest for a deeper understanding of the impacts of all this the Alcatel-Lucent Market and Consumer Insight group has teamed up with IMRB International to piece together the “neo-urbanization” puzzle. The group is traveling across areas of India to better understand the “neo-urbanization” phenomenon in the Indian context and predicting how it will unfold in the next five to 10 years.

Wireless technologies are playing and will continue to play a significant role in facilitating the evolution of the smart grid. With high-speed wireless broadband technologies such as LTE, power utilities and industry forums are engaged in the process of acquiring spectrum for their use and/or sharing the spectrum owned by other organizations and carriers.

Given these trends, it is necessary that utilities have the required data bandwidth to determine the channel bandwidth in the possible wireless licensed spectrum such as 700 MHz and 1800 MHz (1.8 GHz).

In a recent whitepaper, “Smart Grid Bandwidth Requirements,” Alcatel-Lucent examined the bandwidth needed for an Long Term Evolution (LTE)-based Field Area Network covering a utility’s service territory.

With 4G Long Term Evolution still in its infancy, collaboration between customers, suppliers, partners and entrepreneurs is vital to progress. A new Verizon facility that brings all those groups together to collaborate on new devices and services in a live 4G LTE network environment has provided just that dynamic.

When Verizon first envisioned its LTE Innovation Center, they imagined a place where customers, suppliers, partners and entrepreneurs could collaborate and work directly with 4G LTE technology in a live 4G LTE network environment.

“Today, we have just that place. And we’re seeing what’s possible when some of the most creative minds imaginable team up to innovate with 4G LTE technology,” wrote Brian Higgins in a recent article in the Alcatel-Lucent E-Zine Enriching Communications, "Verizon LTE Innovation Center Ignites 4G."

The LTE Innovation Center is unique because it combines a lab environment and an Experience Center where Verizon customers and other technology companies can see demonstrations of the latest 4G LTE innovations.

The super-efficient generation and transmission initiative known as the smart grid is giving electric utilities around the world new challenges and opportunities as they strive to meet increasing demand while deferring additional fossil energy generation projects.

Researchers at Alcatel-Lucent believe the best way for these power suppliers to find balance with new imperatives and consumer expectations is to push innovation deeper into the distribution networks. In an interesting piece, “Smart Grid: The world's leading utilities turn promise into reality,” market leaders explain how they benefit from innovations with the smart grid.

With traditional voice and data margins diminishing, service providers have been forced to look to new avenues for revenue generation. One such opportunity exists in the form of mobile commerce services, which have been proven to help minimize subscriber churn and unearth new applications and content value chain opportunities for revenue growth.

When leveraging the assets of enhanced customer experience, identity and security, operators can take advantage of the inevitable migration toward the mobile phone as a wallet (MPAAW). This is a market that is expected to increase to more than $1.1 trillion by 2014, according to research firm Gartner, and one where Alcatel-Lucent has placed a significant stake in the ground with its Mobile Wallet Service (MWS).

The recent influx of innovative communication and entertainment technologies has increased user demands to new levels. Today's consumers want access to highly interactive, personalized multimedia content on man y and any device – including televisions, smartphones, tables and PCs – all with the same quality of experience obtained via traditional TV viewing. In other words they want video portability, and service providers need a multi-screen video services platform that can accommodate this need and capitalize on the opportunity.

“Successful video delivery requires an understanding of these twin factors, and how best to shape the video experience to deliver them…“Delivering an outstanding QoE is critical for video streaming service providers. It is a differentiating factor in attracting new users, but also the best way to enhance multimedia revenue streams,” the authors stated.